What are China's Muslim 're-education' camps?

The entrance to a jail which locals say is used to hold those undergoing political indoctrination program in Korla in western China's Xinjiang region

Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang are believed to have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslim Chinese - and even foreign citizens - in mass internment camps since spring last year.

Such detention campaigns have swept across Xinjiang, a territory half the area of India, leading to what a US commission on China said is 'the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today'.

Chinese officials have largely avoided comment on the camps, but some are quoted in state media as saying that ideological changes are needed to fight separatism and Islamic extremism.

Radical Muslim Uighurs have killed hundreds in recent years, and China considers the region a threat to peace in a country where the majority is Han Chinese.

The internment programme aims to rewire the political thinking of detainees, erase their Islamic beliefs and reshape their very identities, it is claimed. The camps have expanded rapidly over the past year, with almost no judicial process or legal paperwork.

Detainees who most vigorously criticise the people and things they love are rewarded, and those who refuse to do so are punished with solitary confinement, beatings and food deprivation.